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Where Celtic salt actually comes from

The name is a 20th-century coinage, not a place

Celtic sea salt is harvested from salt marshes on the west coast of France — the Bay of Biscay side of the Atlantic. It does not come from the Celtic Sea, which lies between Ireland, Wales and Brittany. The "Celtic" label was coined by an importer, Jacques Delangre, and the best-known brand using it concedes on its own website that local French producers do not use the term themselves — it does not appear in regional signage or branding there.

So what do the French call it?

Sel gris — grey salt. The most celebrated production area is the Guerande peninsula in Loire-Atlantique, where around 300 salt farmers work roughly 2,000 hectares of ponds and produce about 9,500 tonnes a year. Salt from that specific area carries real legal protection: Label Rouge since 1991, and EU Protected Geographical Indication for "Sel de Guerande" since 2012.

An important distinction, and we will not blur it

Those protections attach to the Guerande name, not to the words "Celtic sea salt", which are generic and could be applied to grey salt from anywhere. Salt of the Earth describe their salt as harvested from Atlantic salt marshes in France. They do not claim Guerande, IGP or Label Rouge status, and neither will we on their behalf. If that matters to you, ask us and we will ask the supplier.

Why the provenance is still worth something

What you are buying is a production method rather than a postcode: seawater concentrated by sun and wind alone, crystallised on a clay floor, raked by hand, and packed without washing, refining or additives. That is a genuinely different object from salt that has been mined, washed, recrystallised and dosed with an anti-caking agent.